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When I was in college, I was a DJ and announcer on the closed-circuit campus radio station, and I did a fair amount of amateur production work in the school’s informal training program for television broadcasting. The fellow who ran the program was a former creative type at CBS, whose world headquarters was just [...]
Written by Travel News on July 19th, 2009 with
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When I was in college, I was a DJ and announcer on the closed-circuit campus radio station, and I did a fair amount of amateur production work in the school’s informal training program for television broadcasting. The fellow who ran the program was a former creative type at CBS, whose world headquarters was just a few miles away across the Hudson River in the Big Apple.
All the equipment we worked with had been donated by CBS as a charitable write-off. The sound board through which we ran the radio station had previously been used to broadcast games on WCBS Radio from Yankee Stadium. Our Crosby Stills Nash & Young albums were played (in mono) through the same circuits that had once hosted Phil Rizzuto shouting “Holy cow!” at Mickey Mantle’s latest exploits. I remember the day that our cast-off, lovingly rehabbed Ampex color videotape machine finally “synced up” (or “locked up”) and started working. The magnetic tape was two inches wide, and the machine itself was the size of a Volkswagen. We superimposed words on the TV screen by printing them out, mounting them onto metal slides about a yard long, and inserting them into an eight-foot-tall contraption known as a “telop” machine. It was all relatively high tech at the time. (Computers used punch cards and had nothing to do with our operation.)
One night the CBS connection paid off far beyond the hardware realm, as I got a chance to head over to CBS Broadcast Center on the far west side of Manhattan and sit in on a broadcast of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. The show was sent live into parts of the Eastern and Central Time Zones in those days, and so it was going to be pretty exciting to be in the room with Cronkite and crew as he read the night’s top stories.
The Broadcast Center building was nothing like the network headquarters (”Black Rock,” the latter was called) on 52nd Street. The Broadcast Center was a low-rise, warehouse affair over near the Hudson River. All brick along the exterior, as I recall, and a fairly serious security set-up at the front door. I drove over, probably in my mom’s Dodge Polara, and miraculously found a place to park.
The hype about the Cronkite show was that it was broadcast from the actual newsroom, and that was true. But it was no ordinary newsroom. It was huge, and of course in the middle of it, on a big riser, was the impeccably lit, immaculate, lofty Cronkite throne. I got there a half-hour or more before air time, and the anchor was already in his seat. The rest of the room was a beehive of activity and noise.
I was shown to a seat at an empty desk a few rows back from the main set, with the control room behind me and Cronkite in front of me. I sat there and watched him preparing, ever so calmly. He was in constant communication with the booth through his earpiece and his microphone, and I was far enough away that I couldn’t make out most of what was being said. As the start time of the broadcast approached, some additional lights came on, and everyone in the room gradually got quieter and quieter, without a word of coaxing from anyone. There were a few teletype machines chugging way faintly in the rear, but it dawned on me that the clackety-clack background sounds that you heard on TV were piped-in sound effects.
With a couple of minutes to go before the show began, you could hear a pin drop. There were few, if any, announcements to the group from the control room. Everyone knew what to do. I was about jumping out of my skin with excitement, but no one else seemed to be.
Finally, the entire crew assumed their battle stations, and soon thereafter, the stage manager pointed at Cronkite. He commenced to read the news to America and the world in his inimitable stentorian tones. “Good evening.” A sublime thing to watch in the flesh.
Now, being a kid from Down Neck Newark, I always had a certain perspective on scenes like this. I couldn’t help thinking, If I opened this desk drawer right now, took out a rubber band and shot a paper clip at Walter Cronkite, half the country would see him duck. And I would be expelled from college. So I sat still.
At one of the commercial breaks, after swearing me to be as unobtrusive as I could possibly be, my mentor took me back to the control room to see the show from that perspective. It was not a serene scene in there, to be sure. The director barked out cue after cue, and the technical director — the guy with his hands on the actual switching equipment that determined which camera, tape machine, or remote feed was beaming out to the audience — was an absolute bundle of nerves. This was live TV, people. But of course, everything went off without a hitch. It was the CBS Evening News, after all. They could do this in their sleep.
Were those guys smoking cigarettes in the booth? I can’t remember. Some of them probably were.
Content-wise, the show is a complete blank to me these 35 to 40 years later. I can’t even remember the precise year, although 1971 sounds about right. It was long after JFK, and years after the lunar mission that we’re remembering this week (ironic that Walter should depart amidst that hoopla), and it was before Watergate. Probably a slow news night. Certainly Cronkite took whatever he was reporting in that broadcast in easy stride.
I was led back out to my assigned vantage point for the last segment, and when it was over, after telling America “That’s the way it is,” the main man walked by me with some of the CBS executives in charge of the show. They retired to a little booth to talk about the broadcast, ever so briefly. The boys in the control room would have a chance to tweak a few things for the West Coast tape-delayed version, but on that night, there didn’t seem to be anything to mess with. The show was fine, every second of it.
For some reason I am thinking that it was a Friday evening, and that Walter was heading out to Cape Cod and his sailboat immediately after the broadcast. I have no confidence in that recollection, but for some reason it’s there. He did seem like a nice guy, albeit a little old, by my standards back then. I will confess that I did not get a handshake.
I always thought that the halo over Cronkite’s head was a little overblown. But he was unsurpassed at what he did, and he was part of an extremely capable organization at CBS News. The power that he and that network wielded over the ensuing couple of decades will never be matched by another media outlet. Now that the cable and internet genies are out of their bottles, there will never be another Walter Cronkite. Google has its place, but it will never take down a sitting President of the United States.
It must be something to be the most trusted man in the world, and Cronkite never betrayed that trust. Now it’s up to us to ferret out our truths in a different way.
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Written by Travel News on July 19th, 2009 with
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